Ahmed Rehab: No stranger to cosmetics
Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
And all the perfumes in Ahmed Rehab's purse will not sweeten the concept of jihad. His attempt to take out his lipstick (what's your favorite shade, Ahmed?) and apply it to jihad is foredoomed to failure. It will fail the next time a Muslim commits murder in the name of jihad -- and unfortunately for Rehab's cosmetic efforts, that happens pretty much every day somewhere in the world.
This deceptive campaign was formulated in response to our AFDI ad campaign, which is entirely truthful: Muslims do quote verses of the Qur'an such as 3:151 to justify violence against infidels. The Chicago Sun-Times and the rest of the mainstream media will continue to charge us with "hate," but unfortunately for them as well as for the cosmetic-minded Rehab, reality will keep breaking through.
"Local Muslim group reclaiming ‘Islam’ with ‘MyJihad’ campaign," by Tina Sfondeles in the Chicago Sun-Times, December 14:
A month after an ultra conservative group plastered controversial “Defeat Jihad” ads on 10 CTA buses and likened Muslims to “savages,” a local Muslim group countered back with a campaign to “reclaim Islam” and educate the country about the true meaning of the word “Jihad.”
In the Chicago Sun-Times, you're "ultraconservative" if you oppose jihad and Sharia. But for the Associated Press, you're "ultraconservative" if you want Sharia and brand its opponents "followers of infidels."
Note also Tina Sfondeles's flagrant dishonesty: our AFDI "Defeat Jihad" ad didn't liken Muslims to savages. The ad read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad." Thus the "savages" are those who pursue jihad attacks against Israeli civilians. By equating those who are undeniably savages with all Muslims, Sfondeles is painting all Muslims with a broad brush and committing "Islamophobia," no?
Through CTA bus and train ads and a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, participants are being asked to express what their Jihad is with the hashtag #MyJihad.By Friday morning, more than 3,000 users had “liked” the campaign’s Facebook page. And on Twitter, thousands have posted what their “struggle” or Jihad is.
“#myjihad Is to have the serenity to accept things I can’t change. The courage to change the things I can, & the wisdom to know the difference,” a man in Saudi Arabia Tweeted.
Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR-Chicago, and creator of the campaign, said the goal is to explain the very misunderstood and sometimes seemingly controversial concept of Jihad.
“Jihad in Islam simply means the struggle to a better place,” Rehab said. “Whatever barrier or burdens that you have in your life, you are asked, you are tasked to muster in the inner courage, the inner resolve, the inner determination to overcome those personal barriers, personal issues.”
He said the word has been misconstrued by Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists and it’s time to re-educate the public about Islam and its concepts. Often the term “Jihad” is associated with violence and those waging “holy war.”
“The only two things that God judges you by in the tradition of Islam are the two things that you control, your intentions and your effort,” Rehab said. “Your intention being sincere and your effort being for the best. That effort is Jihad.”
Naperville mom Angie Emara is featured in one of the ads with her children. She said her Jihad is getting over the loss of her son, and also raising another son with special needs.
“For me it’s personal. I don’t want my kids to grow up in an environment where they’re immediately rendered suspect for nothing of their doing,” Emara said. “...My Jihad is an ongoing struggle…My Jihad is to hold back the tears when I see my son live past Adam’s years and do things he never could. My Jihad is to push forward past the grief, past the second guessing.”
CAIR-Chicago’s campaign, in part, was spurred by the anti-Muslim ads that turned up on CTA buses last month. The ads, financed by conservative blogger Pamela Geller and her organization American Freedom Defense Initiative, have caused controversy — and some legal challenges — in Detroit, New York City and Washington D.C.
“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad,” the ad reads.
The #MyJihad effort is staffed by CAIR volunteers, and the group paid for the CTA ads. But part of the campaign is aimed at seeking sponsors. For $500, a group can sponsor a bus. The group’s goal is to have enough sponsors so that the campaign can reach New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Seattle and Houston.
The four schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence are clear about jihad:
Shafi'i school: A Shafi'i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh ‘Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)...while remaining in their ancestral religions.” ('Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).
Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that Osama et al are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes "obligatory for everyone" ('Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: 'Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until "the final descent of Jesus." After that, "nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus' descent" (o9.8).
Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”
However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)
Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”
Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:
The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God's law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world....The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari'ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: "Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book...is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah." Nyazee concludes: "This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation" of non-Muslims.
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There sure are a lot of misunderstanders...The rest of them just lie, by omission or4 out right...
All that sweetness and light is blue smoke and mirrors to cover for the evil of Islam...